Trending topics: 70th D-Day anniversary

The invasion that changed WWII

In this June 6, 2014 file photo, allied troops crouch behind the bulwarks of a landing craft as it nears Omaha Beach during a landing in Normandy, France. The D-Day invasion broke through Adolf Hitlers western defenses and led to the liberation of France from Nazi occupation just as the Soviet Army was making advances in the east, turning the tide of the war in the Allies favor. Allied troops landed on the Normandy coast of France in tremendous strength by cloudy daylight today and stormed several miles inland with tanks and infantry in the grand assault which Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower called a crusade in which we will accept nothing less than full victory.

This 70th anniversary is important because many of those who took part in Operation Overlord are close to 90 years old or in their 90s. We're losing our direct link to history.

If you search the hashtags #dday and #dday70 on Twitter, you'll find lots of links, historical photos and current images of the battleground.

Quite often, when we review historical events, we see that some of the same mistakes the media make today were made back then. Take June 3, 1944, for example, when your radio station might have announced that the D-Day invasion had begun.

Slate tweeted a link to a story:

Crazy history lesson: On June 3, 1944, American radio broadcasters announced that D-Day had begun. Whoops! http://t.co/uc0192XWeC

According to the Slate story, CBS interrupted the Belmont Stakes to report the Associated Press had confirmed the invasion had begun. Not more than 3 minutes later, AP retracted it. But by then NBC and the Mutual Broadcasting System had announced the start of the invasion.

Many tweets include historical photos and links to stories about the invasion.

Not found in the Twitter universe, though, is the website d-dayforecast.com, which is about the book "The Forecast for D-Day and the Weatherman Behind Ike's Greatest Gamble" by John Ross. He tells the story of Capt. James Martin Stagg who was the only meteorologist who told Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to delay the invasion from June 5 to June 6. It proved to be a brilliant decision.

Michael Beschloss, historian and contributor to NBC and PBS and a contributing columnist for New York Times, tweeted vintage photos including one before D-Day in which the supreme allied commander meets with his troops:

"The one thing I want to emphasize is that we were not heroes. A hero is someone not expected to do something. When you volunteer, and you get trained for it and get paid for it, you may be brave as hell but you are not a hero."

His attitude and modesty exemplify what others have referred to as the "Greatest Generation."